Friday, December 07, 2007

I swear, just when you think it’s safe to go out and play in the traffic you hear yet another story about the wild and woolly goings on in the halls of Fort Bend County’s judicial system.

Bob Dunn fired off yet another amazing report today about how Bud Childers, the newly elected judge who presides in Fort Bend County Court at Law No. 1 now wants to ununrecuse himself. That is, to make it perfectly clear, Childers decided to recuse himself from hearing a case to certify a Needville High school student, the one who burned down parts of his school earlier this year, to be tried as an adult. Then for the actual trial, Childers wanted to unrecuse himself and hear the case.

Now, come to find out, Childers has changed his mind again, and wants to ununrecuse himself. That is rerecuse himself. That is recuse himself one more time.

That alone would make for a good story on how Fort Bend County voters continue to witness the fruits of their labors to go out of their way to elect the most unqualified candidate for county judge from either party to this seat.

That would be enough, but there’s more.

More detail has come out on the inundation of emails that Childers received from Fort Benders who wanted blood. Wanted to punish this teenager with an adult’s sentence. Apparently Judge Childers’ email address and phone number were made public to this group bent on vengeance, and they avalanched his office with advice and demands.

Childers became so concerned about this that he contacted Fort Bend DA Healey to inform him about it. Healey asked Childers to forward to his office information on these callers and emailers, which he did.

But get this, instead of using the list to contact these people to tell them that they were playing it fast and loose with the law by attempting to influence a judge, Dunn revealed that Healey used the list of emailers and callers to build a “Witness list”: people who would be called in to testify on whether the boy should be certified an adult for trial.

Is that not genius? Using the very people who were trying to influence Childers as witnesses in the case. I say Bravo, DA Healey, that shows moxie. That shows thinking out of the box.

That shows the state of justice in Fort Bend County.

But I think Healey can do better. Heck, why not use Childers’ caller and emailer list as a list of prospective jurors? What better way to ensure the desired outcome?